Hello,

just a newbie question. I have a memory card which is formatted with FAT16, but is mounted with VFAT when "auto" is selected. Also, it features long file names, and so it is a real VFAT partition.

It had some broken files/directories/structures, and so it has to be fsck'ed.

In Debian (yes, I use Debian too), I'm used to do:

fsck -f -a /dev/sda1

and everything works. But I tried to do the same in Slackware.

In my Slackware 13.1 (but also 13.0), there is no fsck.vfat to handle the fsck backend. So, if you try the command above, it will not work.

After some research, I found dosfsck from dosfstools. So I tried:

dosfsck -f -a /dev/sda1

and everything seemed to work.

I'd also consider that in Debian there are both fsck.msdos and fsck.vfat backends, but I'm not aware of the real differences between both except by their names.

My question is: can Slackware's dosfsck be used safely with VFAT partitions? My first guess is that yes, it can be used; but this answer seems very superficial, as I'm not aware of the details.

Thanks,

Luiz Ramos

Yes, it can. Dosfsck works for FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 (cause they are all really MS-DOS filesystems) :-)

Also, Slackware taught me to use filesystem checkers directly instead of calling fsck, i. e. call e2fsck, xfs_check, etc. Read the manpages first.

Regards,
V'yacheslav.